quotations about words
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Fair words never hurt the tongue.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Eastward Ho
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
JAMES JOYCE
"The Dead", Dubliners
Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
"Barrow and Newton", Dialogues of Literary Men
The same words
come from each mouth
differently.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Fifteen Pebbles"
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.
MARTIN LUTHER
"Of God's Word", Table Talk
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Investigations
I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
TAD WILLIAMS
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
With words, we can negotiate deals. With words, we can enter into the covenant of marriage. With words, we can declare war. Words reveal our intent and purpose.
RON WOOD
"Words are weapons", Meridian Star, January 23, 2016
In our world, words seem to flow in endless disharmony. Words are often misused in ways that do an injustice to truth. We are exposed to endless words in print, social media and everyday speaking that do not build a framework of goodness, honesty and truth. We experience words that alarm, serve people's own selfish needs, are untruthful, controlling, or seek to appeal in ways that do not speak the truth in love. When the power of self-interest replaces truth, we are headed in the direction of chaos.
LARRY ROREM
"Choosing our words truthfully", Juneau Empire, March 26, 2017
Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
My method is to find a word with a gesture.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
An Evolution in Aphorisms
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
How charming it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
Always having to have the last word is a bad trait. Pisses people off.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
The Lunatic Cafe
A laxity pervades the popular use of words.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ